Lost in Suburbia: Looking in my crystal ball

Tracy Beckerman More Content Now

Wednesday

Feb 6, 2019 at 8:19 AMFeb 6, 2019 at 8:19 AM

I decided I may actually have psychic abilities. I was able to predict with complete accuracy that within 24 hours of paying an obscene amount of money to have my carpets professionally cleaned, the dog would throw up on the family room rug.

Pretty amazing, huh?

With 98 percent of what’s underfoot in my house taken up by wood flooring, it almost defies the odds that the dog would choose the one, the only, the sole 12x20 rectangle of carpeted area in my downstairs to do this. And yet when I came home from running errands the day after the carpets were cleaned, I batted nary an eyelash when I discovered the offending pile that dare-not-be-named.

I wish I could have predicted that my husband would be home when it happened and HE would be the one to have to clean it up. But no, I also foreshadowed that the dog would puke on my watch and I would have to be “She-who-cleans-up-disgusting-dog-things.”

After much muttering under my breath and cursing at the dog and then apologizing to the dog and then cursing at my husband who I didn’t have to apologize to because he wasn’t there, I scooped up all the wretched rags and went to the basement to do the laundry, which, I discovered to my horror, was filled with several inches of water.

Had I been a true psychic, I suppose that after two days of torrential rains I might have foreseen the flooding of my flood-prone basement. But clearly my psychic wires had been short-circuited by the dog incident and I missed the boat on the flood.

However, I did predict that upon stepping into my water-filled laundry room, I would have a monster-sized fit.

Even the Long Island Medium could have predicted that.

Surveying the scene, I dropped the pukey towels on top of the washer and went to rescue three laundry baskets filled with eight loads of clean clothes that I had just finished washing and folding from our vacation. Like most laundry baskets, these had many holes in them. Like most baskets with holes, these also did not float. And so, I then predicted that most of the clothes in the baskets would be sopping wet and I would have to wash almost everything all over again. Ignoring for a moment the monumental laundry task at hand, I sloshed through the water to move some other soggy belongings to higher ground. Suddenly, I felt something slap into and then stick to my leg.

I looked down and saw a dead mouse affixed to my calf.

Trust me. I never saw that one coming.

It turns out that the monster-sized fit I had when I discovered the dog puke was nothing compared to the gargantuan-sized freak-out I had when I saw a dead rodent glued to my leg.

In a panic, I grabbed one of the pukey dog towels and used it to fling the mouse off my leg and across the room where it hit the wall with a soft, wet thud and stayed there.

Then I predicted that I would leave the flood, the towels, the laundry and the dead mouse all where they were, go back upstairs, and not deal with any of it until my husband got home.For more Lost in Suburbia, Follow Tracy on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LostinSuburbiaFanPage and Twitter @TracyBeckerman.